The Cold War was a period in history which provided Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) with unexampled opportunities for covert anti-Soviet operations and agent-running. Colin Figures, who rose to the top of the service as Chief or “C”, made his reputation as an intelligence officer while serving in Warsaw during a particularly tense period from 1959 to 1962.

Figures had a quiet and self- effacing personality, and few of his contemporaries and friends would, in his early days in SIS (MI6), have predicted his subsequent rise to become its chief. However, he was a man of incisive intellect and firmness of purpose, and his subsequent steady rise in SIS did not surprise those closest to him who knew what lay behind his understated manner.

Although what he achieved in Warsaw is still a state secret, his colleagues are agreed that he served there during a period when Soviet counterespionage operations and active measures against the West were aggressive and intense.

After his time in Warsaw, Figures spent ten years mostly in London concerned with affairs behind the Iron Curtain, except for a posting to Vienna, 1966-69, when he found himself dealing with the tumultuous consequences of the Prague Spring of 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechosolovakia. For his services he was appointed OBE in 1969.

Colin Frederick Figures was born in 1925 in Birmingham. After attending King Edward’s School, he did his military service with The Worcestershire Regiment from 1945 to 1948.

In 1946 he was selected for the inter-service Russian language course at Cambridge. This was followed by spells with the British military missions in Romania and Hungary.

In 1948 Figures went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read French and Russian. It was partly on the strength of his Russian that he was accepted as a career officer in SIS in 1951. Service in London was followed by two years in Germany, three in Amman and then his three years in Warsaw.

After a spell between 1973 and 1975 dealing with the affairs of Northern Ireland he held a series of increasingly important appointments at SIS headquarters, then at Century House, near Waterloo. He was appointed CMG in 1978.

In 1979 he became deputy head of the service in 1979 and its chief in 1981. He was appointed KCMG in 1983. He was in charge of the service for four years. A quick and accurate mind, he knew how to delegate and was respected and liked by his subordinates. He was approachable, humorous and entirely unpompous. He inspired confidence in all who dealt with him, including those who mattered in Whitehall and Downing Street.

It was in his tenure of office that SIS was severely tested at the time of the Falklands campaign in 1982, and Figures emerged from the ordeal with his personal reputation much enhanced.

A more difficult challenge for him was guiding SIS into a new era in which rigorous financial disciplines, externally imposed, added to the burden of running a clandestine service in a democracy in which public opinion and the media were less inclined than in the past to respect traditional attitudes towards secrecy.

His term as “C” occurred at a time when SIS was not officially acknowledged to exist, and the identity of its head was supposed to be a secret, covered by the D-notice system.

On his retirement in 1985 from his post as “C”, Figures moved to the Cabinet Office as Intelligence Co-ordinator. His predecessor, Sir Antony Duff, had held concurrently the two positions as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and Co-ordinator. But his successor as JIC chairman, Sir Percy Cradock, was also the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Adviser.

So the Intelligence Co-ordinator’s job fell vacant in 1985. Since it covered the finances of the four intelligence and security agencies, the definition of their priorities and the achievement of harmonious co-operation between them, it was a natural appointment for Figures.

He handled his task smoothly and skilfully for the next four years. He was particularly successful in reorganising the Northern Ireland machinery after the Ballygawley incident of 1988 in which eight soldiers were killed by a landmine. He finally retired in 1989.

He is survived by his wife, Pamela, whom he married in 1956, and by their son and two daughters.

Sir Colin Figures, KCMG, OBE, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1981-85, and Deputy Secretary, Cabinet Office, 1985-89, was born on July 1, 1925. He died on December 8, 2006, aged 81